My arms aren't big enough to match my thighs

Monthly Archives: April 2012

Update: Well I am fucking sick again. Sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning I got a nice fucking combo of a fever/strep throat/headache/nausea. Glad my training wasn’t going so fucking well.

Didn’t have to work this past weekend. It was pretty sweet. Working nights is real cool . . . Anyways. Two people I know got signed for the NFL this past week. My roommates best friend got picked up by the Falcons, Nissley, and my friend Rennie Moore Jr got picked up by the Texans. Congratulations to them. Hard work pays off. Both of these dudes are absolute monsters. If I recall correctly Adam is about 6’6 and Rennie is about 6’4. Giants.

Training news.

I am about to be right back on track from the de-load. Hit 410×2/420×2 today on bench. In a week or two I will be completely back on track and ready to hit some PR’s.

This song is pretty tight. I am exhausted and don’t know what to post so this will be random babbling.

Lastly, something I want to touch on. A lot of people think they need a new program or something like that when they hit a plateau. I’m curious if anyone has any idea about resets? And if you do then during your training YOU WILL TAKE A LOT OF THEM. People don’t stop progressing at a 300 pounds squat (depending on a few things). If you hit a peak or fail during a session take a reset and try to cover as many variables as possible so the next time you try to hit the numbers you failed at YOU HIT THEM. Sleep. Eat. Prepare. I can’t tell you how many times I did resets when I was on my LP. I would drop 10-20 pounds off the bar and work my way back up and work back up with even more intensity. I remember I finally got to 405x5x3 just to injure my hip flexor on the last set. I bill starr’d my ass all the way back up from the bar. Most people don’t need a new program/move to the Texas Method as early as they do. I milked the fuck out of my LP and made my way to 460x5x3.

I gained the weight I needed to gain and I did everything possible to ensure the success of my training. There was a great Michael Jordan quote that I saw today “I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”. I didn’t PR on anything for about 6 months last year, and I continued to bust my ass under the bar.

Update:
Taught my buddy Tommy how to squat today. He is trying to lose weight and I wrote up a little program for him. He is 300 pounds. His learning curve on squats was about 3 sets. It was like everything I said he executed perfectly. I really enjoyed it.

Been busy helping with Football all day. They had their ironman challenge today. Monkey bars–20 Yard Weighted Wheel Barrow Push–Tire Flipx2–Atlas Stones 115/130/175–Zig Zag Bear Crawl–Med Ball Toss Over Goal Post–80 Yard Sled Pull #100–Run Over 5 Bags–80 Yard Farmers Walk #65–Cart Push 10 Yards. Keep in mind that there was about 10–30 yards in between each station. Today was a fantastic example of how de-conditioned a sport specific powerlifter can be. I set a goal just to finish it and I accomplished that. With that said I sucked total ass. Been out in the sun since around 10 with a few minutes inside to eat and rest. Real tanked out right now. I’ll try to lift later tonight after I get some food in me. I don’t see it going smoothly though.

This is something that I wanted to point out from the comments:Bedhead03 says “Yeah no doubt that helps alot. What sort of rep ranges do you do for warm up or is it moore of a do what works on the day sort of thing?”

Hopefully all of you have a set warm-up routine for every lift. The sets and rep-range do not change that often. For example, If you were going to do 405 for a work set the warm-up would go as following: Barx5x2/135×5/225×3-4/315×2-3/365×1/405×5. If you don’t warm-up you’re an idiot or if you do a fuck-ton of reps before your work set you’re an idiot.

Don’t be a gordon. Lift Smart. The goal is the work-sets not the warm-ups.

Back to the normal lifting schedule. Last week was a de-load. Stumbled upon this clip for the new movie “Prometheus”. The acting from Michael Fassbender is scary good. He won me over when he played Magneto in X-men: First-Class. He is a phenomenal actor and probably the reason I go see Prometheus. In work news, We had a rave at the bar Friday. It was pretty tight. They had these glasses there that lit up. Felt like I was in Tron.

Solid comments from Friday btw. If you guys have questions about your lifting PLEASE let me know. I have been emailing back and forth with some of you and I feel like it’s been extremely productive. Videos help out a lot too. It’s hard to “coach” via comments. I am also pretty impressed that 588 people have seen that picture of me dumping. That’s not a lot by internet standards, but more than enough to make me giggle.

Side note, I’m really looking forward to getting Diablo III. Haven’t played a solid computer game in a long time and Diablo is one of my favorites. God damn this post is so NOT cohesive. For some reason I am real fucking brain dead today and can’t write for shit. Questions? Comments? Concerns?

I don’t have much to post. Back to regular volume after a few days off. I’ll use this post to answer questions for the 4 people that check this blog. AND if you have any video requests. The full gallon challenge video will be done soon enough. We are waiting for the last two guys to do it and they are pushing it back each time. I know I said I would make a bench video explaining the set-up and I WILL FOR SURE make it Friday. I forget easy.

I competed in the GSU Strongman competition on Saturday. It was really fun and I enjoyed doing odd shit like Fingal Fingers. A few fellow friends competed with me (Norman, Mitchell, Rhett, Hamilton, Brooks, and Matt). I placed second and Norman placed third. Tall ass brooks (6’5-6’6) placed first. My overall thoughts on the competition are that the events were based on muscular endurance not strength. Most of the weights were light and required a good mix of cardiovascular endurance and muscular endurance. I mean the god damn log press weighed 130 pounds. You had to clean and press the leg as many times as you could in one minute. It would have been waaaay fucking cooler if they had 3-5 set weights that the lifter could attempt, in ascending order. Instead it’s a fucking rep test. The meet could have run a little more efficient too. They were 20 minutes late to start and it took an hour to do 2 events. I guess it’s a learning experience for everyone though. To top it all off I’m pretty sure I hurt my back and I am really fucking sunburned. It was fun, just wish it was more of a “Strong” man type thing.

The tire weighs about 350 pounds. The other tire they had, which they used when both guys raced, weighed 20 pounds less. Nobody had an answer to why we were racing with mismatched tires.

This was the last event for the top two overall competitors

And here you can see that the sunburn has kicked in. Nobody noticed until we all got home. Every one of us didn’t even think about it. Thats Rhett on the left and Hamilton in the center.

Last, but not least the shitty video for you guys. The fucking camera battery died 20 minutes into the competition. I was real fucking pissed. I was looking forward to making a video from this. I apologize for the lack of footage here. On a side note, none of us trained for this. AT ALL. I realized after the fact I half-assed everything. I said “pace yourself” in actuality I just went slow.

Taking a little bit of weight off this training week (which starts on Thursdays for me). Just went up to one set of volume for my bench. I feel like I have been going too heavy for too long on bench. Starting to stay sore over a longer period of time. It’s a good hint to take a de-load. I am also doing the strongman competition this Saturday at the RAC. Atlas stones, shit like that. I want to go in a little fresher for that too so I can have some fun.

Jay asks:Good stuff here, AC. How often do you find yourself having to up the volume on bench?
Not number bragging because obviously I pale in comparison to you, but my volume bench is 4×5 with 225, and I use ascending sets on my ME day. Yesterday was 3×2 with 280, 290, and 300.
Obviously 75 lbs of difference between the weight used on volume vs the top set on ME day.

I usually keep the volume the same for several weeks. I try not to increase the volume at all if I am doing well on Intensity days. If I start to slack on Intensity I go through a mental checklist of shit in my head to see if there was something that hindered it other than volume (sleep, food, rest, etc). I will most likely attempt the same numbers on Intensity days again, but with the increased volume.
–A.C.

Went to Daniel Tosh’s stand up on Tuesday. It was fucking awesome btw. If you guys don’t like Tosh, then we wouldn’t be friends. Here is the obligatory gay picture before the show.

This will be a light post because I really don’t have anything to write about. I really have to take a dump so I don’t wanna sit in this chair for much longer.

Rough weekend. Started to feel sickish on Friday. Tried to get some good sleep in, but had some friends wake me up at 2. Then Saturday we had a night on the town. It was pretty tiring. Probably wasn’t a good idea either. I only get like 1 time a month to party so I make it count. This always leads to a rougher training week, at least at the start. Woke up 2 hours past my alarm this morning and rolled over into the puddle of drool I was spewing out all night. Got up and trained. It wasn’t the best day, but I did hit some PR’s on Bench. I’ll hit some good numbers on Squat tomorrow too. My squat will finally be back up into PR range by tomorrow as long as my throat doesn’t get worse. Here is this mornings bench. Hit 420×2/425x2ish. My buddy Matt spotted me this morning and he did kinda touch the bar. Not is fault or anything. He was just being a good spotter.

Agnes didn’t lift this morning with me. Probably because she doesn’t feel good from all the drinking that occurred on Saturday. She is gonna lift tomorrow. And for Jstad7 I just moved my bench to descending sets. I had to increase the volume to shorten the gap between the intensity days. I’ll probably do a de-load on bench next week. I’ve gone about 5 weeks heavy without a real de-load week in there. In friend news, my buddy Taylor puked when he went for 455×3 on deadlift this past week. I wish I was there to watch that shit go down. Here is the video of it.

Here is Mitch hitting a PR on squats with 425×3. Mitch really works hard for this. That’s what separates guys like him and Taylor from the rest. They only weigh around 160 pounds, but they put in the hard work.

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Ha silly me. I almost forgot about this.

Well if isn’t a punch you in the fucking face with videos day. Two more guys want to do the challenge. I will make the full video after they do it toooooo.

The “Gallon Challenge” will be revisited tonight or tomorrow. Trevor wants to try it again, this time with a partner. Our other good buddy/All-American/Socon Lineman of the year/Brent Rusell is gonna give it a shot. These fine gentleman weigh in at a combined 600 pounds. We will find out later tonight if they can crush a gallon of milk in one hour and hold it down. I seriously doubt it. If these big fuckers can’t do it, then no one can. The video will be posted sometime this week/weekend.

Training is solid. Was a little dehydrated today due to the diarrhea I’ve had for the past 2 days. My energy was kinda zapped for the volume day today. See how it feels for squats tomorrow. Trying to pound down some powerade and pedialyte. I should be good by tomorrow. If not I can just fucking complain about it some more and have a fiery asshole.

BTW, Shit gets real in Ironworks. Those guy train hard. Just take a look at this POV shot of Zach doing dumbbell sit-ups. You can’t say he isn’t intense, cause he’ll kill you.

Had a really long weekend. Worked the stage room during our Gorilla Zoe concert on Saturday. It was about 85-90 degrees in that room because of all the people in their and the body heat coming from them. Long sweaty, sweaty, sweaty night. Felt like it took a little juice outta me. It will be fine. I could go cry about it or something, but I won’t write about it if I do. Every time Gorilla Zoe pulled a girl on stage 40 more behind her tried to run up too. I had to stop them EVERY TIME. They would bitch and yell at me saying “WHY CAN’T WE GO UP THERE!?!?!?!?!?”. I would just wave them away. Pretty much if Gorilla Zoe didn’t pull you up on stage you’re not getting on the fucking stage. I wanted to inform these girls to go ahead and fuck themselves and then inform them that they aren’t special. Stressful man. Stressful.

My bench is going great btw. I plan to hit at least 400 in competition now. The next one is is August. In Kileen, Texas. The crew will meet up again and the circle will be complete. Really looking forward to it. I also get to see my buddy Taylor when I go. Here is a recent video of my benching. It was today (4/2/12). The man behind the camera is Brandavious and the LARGE gentleman doing the intro is Maxwell. Both were former football players here at Southern. They had their last season and now they are just getting huge. Anyways, here is the benching